Every bull market you get folks from web2 FANGs, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc joining web3 companies. They bring with them their web2 ways of doing things. Bankless often says: “when people join crypto ,they adopt crypto values”. We press X to doubt on that.
Truth is much of web3 is being used via proprietary web2 APIs. Pushing as much stuff as posible to servers is a second nature and never questioned in silicon valley crypto. Needless to say, if you are interacting with web3 via permissioned web2 APIs, you completely abandoning any and all decentralization.
This is not just theoretical. We’ve seen metamask blocked entire country of Venezuela “by mistake”. Infura dropped support for tornado cash in the heartbeat. Too much of web3 is built with reliance on proprietary, censorable web2 APIs. And by the very same people who built censorious web2 that we rail against. These guys had their chance.
In our view, Western world is getting increasingly, rapidly more authoritarian. Mass surveillance, banning and cancellations. CRS, FACTA, Patriot Act, Operation Choke point and so on. Only force pushing against this ever en-crouching trend is crypto. We'll be damned if it is controlled by the same people who built and control censorious web2.
How strongly do we feel about it ? We traded our cushy jobs at Silicon Valley. Working about 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. While still topping the best performers charts. Traded that for 90% salary hair cuts, working 16 hours day, 6-7 days week. Our spouses were really thrilled to hear that.
Gateway to web3 is your wallet. Virtually every wallet out there connects to web3 via centralized RPC providers. We got light Geth node running on the phone prior the merge. LES had a lot of drawbacks, but we were on track to be only readily available wallet that did not use RPC service to interact with web3. Then merge happened and LES broke. Geth team is working LES 2.0 right now. Current spec actually fixes most of the issues with LES 1.0. We annoy the geth team about once a month, keep suggesting LES 2.0 provides more historical blocks. LES 2.0 is coming and web3 wallet will support it from day one. In the mean time we are using Pokt.Network. Which is the most decentralized RPC provider as far as we can tell.
Alarmingly few people seem to be worried about RPC services censorship choke point. If you care about it deeply, you are in good company. As Vitalik has been outspoken supporter of light clients.
There is also matter of telemetry. Collecting user analytics. Considerable amounts of DeFi front ends collects user data. Or ping home servers and or rely on servers to run. There shall be zero telemetry in web3 wallet.
Another matter is relying on other web2 APIs to gather transaction history, or NFTs and so on. Or running servers at all. There 10s of 1000s of Ethereum nodes. We should be getting data from chain directly. There should be no need to run servers or to use web2 APIs. Again in the interest of decentralization and censorship resistance. Sadly I have to note we fall short here for now. We are using NFT APIs for initial version. This will be removed in couple of weeks.
Normies do everything on the phone. If web3 is to get mass adoption, it has be as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter on the phone. Guess what most of this stuff either does not work on the phone or is far from usable by normies. There are maybe a dozen product categories that work in web3 so far. Swaps, Lending Borrowing, Staking, Governance, Naming services, Perpetuals, Options, Bridges, Mixers. We are building generic UI for each category. And user can choose the provider. For example there is consistent UI for swaps, that is hopefully normy friendly. And user can choose if they want to use Uniswap, 1Inch, Matcha or anything else. We are interacting with smart contracts directly. Not using web2 APIs. So if you don’t like that Uniswap is collecting analytics or blocking some coins. Use uniswap via web3 wallet circumventing their front end.
We’ll of course add support for wallet connect as well, so that user can connect to any app. But we want to provide great UI & UX for selection of native integration of most blue chip products in web3
Speaking of UI. Mornen app design is so boring and makes us wanna blow our brains out. Out initial UI was designed by ex-Apple designer. Hate it or love it. It definitely does not look like any other wallet out there. Jammed packed with wild colors, memes, custom crafted controls and bespoke animations. Hopefully it helps us to stand out. We fully realize it is not for everyone. So we have variety of more traditional themes to choose from.
Initial motivation behind this whole thing is, we saw how the sausage is made. And it was not living up to cypherpunks ideals. We also remember having to rush home to participate in an IDO. As we were unable to do so from our phones. Our goals is to create most balls to the wall cypherpunk web3 wallet. That also covers all your degens needs, all the while making it possible for normies to use web3 in selfcustiodial, censorship resistant manner. As our saint lord Satoshi intended.
For those who followed closely are aware of our woes. After becoming connoisseurs of eating glass, we were finally able distribute open beta Testfligh build last week. We were jubilant. But but not relieved. As there was one more dragon to slay. We were aware of Apple’s stand offish attitude when it comes to crypto apps. Coinbase and Uniswap had their horror stories. Frankly we were very worried that Apple would reject it for whatever reason.
But on Friday we got the best eamil of my lifes. App status. Approved Pending developer release!
You can download web3wallet on iOS AppStore right now!
web3wallet by sons of crypto
by cypherpunks, for cypherpunks
by degens, for degens
You can join beta builds here. Extended versions of story so far was told on web3 trenches podcast
Last thing. This is the worst version of the app there’ll ever be. 1.0 MVP. It will only get better from here. We aim to have new version every two weeks. 1.0.1 is already well under way. If you'd like know what is next. Post with near-min term roadmap and reasoning behind it dropping in a day or two.
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sons of crypto